The Writing Walls are Crumbling.

Tags

Biden, bipartisan, debate, discussion, left wing, moving forward, right wing, Trump, walls

I have had a very hard time blogging over the past four years. It wasn’t just Donny and his insane cabal but his many followers. I have unfriended many people during this reign, and I have blocked many of them. And I did try to listen. I tried to understand the divide, not just in America but in Canada and around the world . I have teased and ridiculed not only Donny but these followers. I knew converting the mindless was not possible, but they were never my target. I targeted the middle-of-the road centrists, the non-partisan voters who see truth above party politics. Unfortunately, these people tend to be more laissez-faire and vote less than the indoctrinated [on both sides]. Biden winning the vote feels like a victory but a tainted one. We are not in a good place.

Now that we have a change on the horizon, can I dump the farcical memes and get back to arguing with logic? I hope I can. I hope we all can. I would much rather see far-righters and far-lefties write out what they believe and openly discuss their arguments. I would hope we can all sit down quietly, read others’ stances on issues, and work to some consensus. It is this back and forth playing with ideas that moves us forward. It is how I move my writings forward. I don’t write knock-out stories in one go. It takes many tries of pushing that theme or pushing this character or pushing that conflict. All of my best writing has come from pushing into areas I never ended up in. The same is true, I believe, for moving forward in social and political discourse. Life is story, and those of us who write a lot of story can attest that what we think is best almost always is not.

I could not write much about life these past four years because so many have adopted views of life I do not agree with. And no, it is not just the righties. I am anti-government. When governments in my Canada want to implement new programs, I cringe, because I know my government’s debts will rise with no compensating benefit. Too many pay no service at all to our enormous debts.

What do I want to Write About?

The list is long, and I don’t claim to be qualified to write about much of it. But the following is a quick list.

• Socialism
  • what is it?
  • where should social policies fit in a capitalistic society?
  • what do Liberals really want?
  • what are Conservatives afraid of?
• Competition
  • I am for competition, when it makes sense
  • when does competition not make sense?
  • how do we manage non-competitive units so everyone is happy?
• Executive Accountability
  • this is currently a critical problem in not only America but in Canada and around the world
• Taxation
  • does the low-taxation-of-billionaires model make sense?
  • what is the logical management perspective on achieving good government?
  • of course, taxation of expatriates and management of tax fraud.
• Reading and Writing
  • I work at my writing every day. I have many ideas on making writing more interesting and relevant
  • reading is a forgotten skill. We have millions of experts who do not read anything more than Facebook posts or their favorite news headlines
  • how to correctly punctuate lists 😉
• Racial Injustice
  • unfortunately, the list is endless!
• My many other interests: books, fountain pens, inks, poetry, nutrition, diabetes, and more.

There is so much to write about and such little time to do it. I’ve been sitting on my hands for so long, I don’t really know if I can do this. Is Humpty Trumpty falling off the wall enough to get me back into this? But of course I have to write. The only way we’re going to move forward as a civilization is through discourse and debate. I remember when the Berlin Wall started to come down. It was the day my firstborn entered the world. I was so hopeful. The world really did seem to offer a brighter future. But of course we’ve erected replacement walls, and unfortunately we always will. I think the purpose of my writing and many other blogs has to be the dismantling of walls. These ideological walls need to crumble.

The SAD month of MAY

April was poetry month, and now May is short story month. That’s a short story a day, every day, for 31 days. I’ve done seven NaNoWriMos and eight NaPoWriMos or equivalents. I don’t want to try to name this month. NaSsWriMo?

I sat at my desk on Monday, May 1, 2017, having written 54 poems and a blog post about it, wondering what to write next. Do I pull out 2012 and commit three or four months to fixing it? Do I continue salvaging parts of 2016 to make a short story collection? Maybe I should pull out 2010 or 2014 and have a second go at those unfinished novels. 2016 called the hardest and I’d all but settled on it. That would mean skimming the 50,000 words looking for nuggets. I have pulled the first three scenes as stories already, but where to next? Always the question.

So I did what any good writer would do: I opened Facebook. Almost immediately I found a post by my friend Andrea about a contest in May to write a short story a day. We talked about this in the past on our Sunday morning write-ins, I’ve participated in 15 other x-a-day events, so I didn’t need to think about the implications very much. I went to the Story-A-Day site, signed up, took the first prompt, and wrote a 1489 word story.

Bang. #1 done. It felt great.

\The story had nothing to do with anything I’ve written before, but it was based on reality. For that reason alone, I will not share it. Especially where fiction is weaved in, and some of that fiction is not nice. Sorry I had to kill you off, X.

May 2’s prompt fit almost perfectly a scene/story for 2016 I had been pondering. I sat and wrote. I took a break at 500 words to think, ponder, and write nasty political tweets — Even though I gave up my U.S. Citizenship, I still fight for Americans living abroad. And I’ve been quite acerbic lately towards the liberal shills out there supporting #FATCA and calling people like me tax cheaters.

I could not fit today’s prompt into any existing project, which is no concern, but I could fit it into a potential 2017 NaNoWriMo story. I’ve been pondering writing Science Fiction instead of my social conscious urban literary stuff.  I only invested 313 words in it, but I think it is full of theme, conflict, and potential. The conflict is implied: we’re all becoming the same, and what does that mean for humanity. Could be my backbone theme for my seen-book series *grin* It is a very thin piece, trite, but I actually love it. I will try to write more around this piece and other ideas this month and through the busy summer ahead of me. NaSsWriMo might just make NaNoWriMo very productive.

Enjoy

Prompt: People called him The Doll Maker. Nobody ever wondered aloud why every doll had the same face.

“Did you guys see Doctor Davis’ new robots?”

The lunch table paid no attention to him. Jared set down his tray and pulled in his chair.

“He can choose any face he wants with a few clicks but he picks the same face, the same physical features for every one of them. You guys don’t find that odd?”

“Jarrod,” Emily says. “You had a busy morning? You’re late.” She stuffs a roll of California Gold into her mouth.

“You haven’t heard a word I said.”

“Sorry,” she says as she crunches on the crusty, green roll of processed unknowns the government has certified as optimally nutritious for young scientists. She chases it with a glass of fortified water the color of the noon sky as displayed in the wall monitors. “We were just discussing Doc Davis’ new robots. Did you know he ordered them to all look identical? Why would he do that?”

Jarrod picked the gray New Jersey Jets roll up from his gray plate. “It makes no sense. You’d think he was building an army or something.”

Emily inspects her mint-green plate for crumbs but finds none. “I know. It’s so creepy. We’re not going to be able to tell which is which.”

“They’re all fucking robots,” William chimes in with his usual cheer. “Who cares what they look like? You ask for a Solar Coffee, they get you a Solar Coffee. It’s not like you’d have sex with one of them.”

“Speak for yourself,” Emily says.

“They’re all male,” Jarrod says.

“So?” says William.

“They’re all so…unremarkable,” Emily says and smiles.

“He could have selected at least some variety,” Jarrod says.

“They’re robots,” William says.

“What does he have planned?” they all say simultaneously. They stop but don’t laugh.

William picks up his blue Florida Fish Roll from his light-blue plate and looks at it. “Why are they all the same?”

 

Blizzard

Tags

blizzard, chronic pain, shoulder pain, sleep deprivation, weather

I write this from the middle of a blizzard, our second in four days. I don’t use the term blizzard lightly, but I live in a winter storm belt and 30 plus centimeter (1ft) snowfalls are common. The National Weather Service defines a blizzard as a storm which contains large amounts of snow OR blowing snow, with winds in excess of 35 mph and visibilities of less than 1/4 mile for an extended period of time (at least 3 hours). Being unable to see the road from a sidewalk is not unheard of. The image below is from two years ago.

 

My life the past few months has been blizzardy. In August 2016 I somehow partially tore a tendon in my shoulder. I’ve lived with nearly constant pain since then. It is not intense pain but it wears on you. The worst part is trying to sleep. An arm hangs straight when I sit or stand, and the tendon likes that. But lie down and the arm wants to move sideways or backwards. Ouch. Most of my sleeps have been two-hour sessions, and I wake in stiffness and pain. I stay up for a couple of hours, try to write, let the pain dissipate, and go back to bed for hopefully two more hours sleep. I’ve slept six hours maybe three times in the last six months.

Lack of sleep is an insidious condition. It slows your thinking, your memory, and your concentration. Writing, editing, thinking, learning, exploring a poem, whatever I try to do is impacted negatively. Yet somehow I finished NaNoWriMo, Robert Brewer’s November Chapbook Challenge, have written at least a poem a week, have studied poetry, and have edited some of my novel. Short sessions. Even now my mind drifts back to my throbbing shoulder.

Then there was the election. The election affects my novel as my story is set in Canada’s political environment. It is a trip across the nation and explores various protests, the divide between left and right. It is not so much a political book, but it is. It was written when this extremist divide was more or less defined in my head. left likes this; right likes that. But now President Trump has thrown a bag of hammers into the political machinery. I struggle with trying to understand him, people who support him, and people who defend him. I struggle with the left too but on a more purely ideological scale. The question of whether my story is relevant haunts me, and it has hobbled my progress.

I think it is still valid, and in many ways I think my message is more relevant than ever. I’ve been through reader feedback and am now reading to myself aloud.  I am up to page 65 of 303 in my Word document, and I hope today I might knock off a hundred more pages.

Anyway, I wrote a poem this week after the last blizzard ravaged us. I had originally written it with longer lines, but it didn’t work very well. Too much wallowing image and emotion and not enough tension, so I busted it into short, tight lines. I had it all in one stanza, but I do have some logical breaks in scenery. I don’t know if it will speak to you, but it speaks to me. I have lived through at least one blizzard a year for the last 46 years.

Oh, and the shoulder is slowly improving. Motion is up, MRI was definite, and back to physio today if the storm lets me.

Blizzard

a biblical plague
snowballs from
the fists of God
smack you in the face
the wind sucks
the breath from your lungs
a frozen sneeze
spraying your world
the howling ghosts
of dead trains

slippery footing
hobbling
plunging bodies
shoulders lean into
conflicted heat differentials
slams you hard
into the boards
grabs your collar
throws straight punches
tight knuckles

a father and son
killed
the New Jersey Turnpike
doesn’t care
if you are hunkered and afraid
the raid comes
brave cower
the regretfully stupid
quantum motion
of infinite chaos

the day before
calm
wet and clammy
you could smell it
coming up the coast
throbbing temples
filled with supplicants
refugees
nobody lays claim to
a blizzard

The front window view at 6:20AM

NaNoWriMo 2016 Aftermath – the novel

I wrote 50,091 words. It might be telling that as soon as I noticed I had reached the mark, I stopped writing mid-sentence. It’s not that I don’t believe in this story, but at 11:30 pm after playing trivia at the pub and drinking three 25 ounce beers, after being awake since 3 am and writing regularly throughout the day (5,109 for the day), including a poem, I was a bit tired.

My approach to this novel was entirely exploratory. I wrote three characters I could not normally relate to about subjects literally outside of my experiential scope. I am a 55 year old white male and I wrote about women’s rights; I wrote about a white, privileged, authoritarian, right-winged, American male and I consider myself a white, lower-middle-class, introverted, centrist truth-seeker; I wrote about a woman, a mother, who had sacrificed her career for money, who had sacrificed her dignity for her husband’s empire. for her family’s standing, but who worked through the years to escape the binds; I wrote a high school senior, a girl, who preparing to enter the adult world learns there are adult issues and that being a woman is in no way equal to being a man nor is it fair, but she does not see any reason it cannot be. I knew these people as well as I knew people on the news.

I know them better now, but I don’t honestly know them. I am happiest with my father and daughter stories. I am not so happy with mom’s. I won’t detail the issues or the stories, but Mom’s is rather hyperbolic. Her story pushes my boundaries, and my boundaries are quite malleable.

It is a story told from the three perspectives. Faulkner’s The Sound and the Fury and Kingsolver’s The Poisonwood Bible are both on my near-term reading list, both because of they follow similar structures. One of my issues is the interaction. Each character has their own story instead of being a single story. Dad and daughter interact closely, and Mom and Dad do as well, but Mom and the daughter not so much. I expect a lot of pondering, reflective writing (which this blog is), and planning over the next few months. I hope to attack it again in February, but I may never revisit this story.

The writing is mostly active. It is not particularly literary or deep; though at times I dig into more imagery and reflective prose. It borders more on YA than it does adult literary. It’s another decision I have to make: who is its audience? All of the above?

Anyway, here’s a fairly innocent example of Dad (and a conflict already raises its ugly head: he knows from experience he has to walk alone, yet he has rarely done so¿).

Why can’t that woman make a decent pot of coffee? Made fresh and tastes a week old. All you need to do is pour in the pre-packaged grounds and flip the water switch. Does she not clean the pot first? The regular coffee brewers are all in training, and Carl knows from too much experience with difficult clients that he needs to get away from his desk and think, get away from the office and let the insane outside world temper his disdain.

Carl wonders how his city looks so strange in the mid-morning, and thinking back over his career at Harris and Saunders he cannot recall simply walking the streets alone if it was not lunch time or dinner time. He has always been accompanied by his mentor Keith Saunders, his current aging partner, Keith’s brother Peter Saunders, a senior manager, or a client.

He feels lost. He knows the streetlights but only from the view from behind his windshield, raised, perpendicular and parallel, not these angular perspectives. The shops are strange. A Subway shop. How long has that been there? A foreign restaurant. Indian? Egyptian? Turkish? Its letters remind him of when he tried to teach his young kids how to write. Lauren caught on pretty quickly, but Michael took a few years. Boys and girls, they are so different. Carl looks for a coffee shop but can’t find any. Where do all these young hotshots go on their break? He comes to an intersection, looks left, and sees a large, brown coffee cup swinging in the warm breeze.

November 2016 Poetry – PAD

While November is my primary novel starting month (25,435 words written through the first 17 days), I am also participating in the Chapbook Challenge, a poem a day event run by Robert Lee Brewer over at Poetic Asides.

I will be honest: I am putting nearly all of my energy into getting this novel on a good road. 50,000 words of prose is not a finished novel, not the first draft, not even close. But in my experience, the tighter you can make the story now, the easier it will be to finish later. It’s one of these things called paradoxes: two extremes with no logical compromise. I do want to keep it tight and in track, but I also need to ignore my boundaries and explore when the urge arises.

They call this urge ‘characters telling you what they want to do’ in your story. Right up there with other myths like women are unequal to men in every discernable way except for having babies and doing housework (I am writing about women’s rights, and I am being facetious, unenduring as my words are). The truer version is our minds are not linear, organized machines. They respond to input. Our minds are much more reactive than active, sometimes. The reactive minds are creative: throw a word, an image, a sound, a smell, a situation… and the reactive mind finds a new door and opens it. And if they are willing to step through, there is always a whole new world behind that door. The reactive mind become an artist: painter, photographer, designer, musician, sculptor, dancer… a writer, a poet.

Poems are created by walking through new doors but are also unexplored doors themselves. There is an element of craft to poetry, an element of care. Those first responses are first steps through doors, down new pathways, and they need further exploring. But my mind this month is wandering down prosaic doors this month, secondary pathways, ideas of white privilege and feminist movements and high school immaturity and searches for personal freedom without entrapping yourself in media prisons. I am writing first drafts of poetry this month, then abandoning them for my novel.

And then there was the election. In my mind, there’s a name for a person who cannot open doors in their mind. It’s a Republican!

Here is a collection of my poems from this month so far that might actually resemble poems. I’ll give the prompt for each.

Nov. 18, 2016
Prompt: write a poem that uses the following six words:

• band
• logic
• pack
• web
• froth
• clean

before coffee

a pack of lies bandied freely
as if authored in biblical times
unseen film directors and misguided preachers
it is now a fact-free, logic-free world
we live in a dream projected through the web of
rhetoric and fallacy
the land without physical filters
and Bubba tightens his tie and grips his shifter
clean living his myth
unclean politics his gift

Nov. 17, 2016
Prompt: Paper

Background: some days you just want to have fun 😉

God made paper on day eight
An afterthought, a flick of fate
He made a mark with his feather pen
Invented glyphics over and again
The very first Ibis
Sat on the first papyrus
And Shat the first whiteout
On the very first script

Nov 16, 2016
Prompt: Play (blank)

Go! We’re through
No choice, no option
No money for a cab home
My dice fail to monopolize
Fives and tens, a lone fifty
No hope of consolidation or peace

B&O and Water Works
The corner store supplies my food
Chips and soda
I can run water
But not was my clothes
Life is no fun
With cards stacked against

A community bailout
My only chance
A gift from the man
A lucky seven
Skirts disaster, again
But all I get is a ban
And do not get to pass Go!

Nov 11, 2016

Prompt: write a description poem. Pick someone or something to describe

My Mug

My morning maw of motivation maintenance
A fire-hardened rock
A liquid lover that sips on life
A great handle, on the trends
It is essential, to my well-being
It is vital, to my happiness
I toast of tastefulness, I boast
Of wastefulness
A Saturday morning reading club, I host
My own internal parties
I get more out of it than I pour in
And it gets more out of me than I bleed out
Shakes me awake, yet grounds me
With its fragile weight

Nov 10, 2016
Prompt: Tragedy

Background: I wrote the last line and asked myself ‘now what?’ I immediately succumbed to Thesaurusitis and looked up plan. I then saw the need to link each line, so I linked them into a story. This is not so much a freely written poem as it is a construct of form. Still, it’s a fun read.

The Plan

Your policy of sympathy, combined
with intentional apathy, implemented
by methods of rationality, coordinated
through arrangements of fantasy, stopped
since procedures for bankruptcy, tempered
his program of apathy, complicated
a project of gadgetry, intimated
her suggestion of jalousie, encompassed
in their system of stagnancy, concluded
the treatment a travesty, became
a strategy of tragedy

 

Nov. 9, 2016
Prompt: Call Me (blank)

Background: this was more about my platonic relationships with women than the image of two old politicians bantering, but that’s what we might as well be. And I wanted to use the image I recently took in Charlottetown PEI of the two Fathers of Confederation named John Hamilton Gray.;)

Call me, when you’re free
We can chat, and pretend
We’re old friends
Catching up on, lost times
Times on the mend
No walks on the beach, for us
No bitters in the pub
Just a cup of coffee
And a warm muffin
We can be intimate
But we cannot be close
We can share our dreams
But not our secrets
We can agree, to disagree
On the pedigree of our lives
We will not jeopardize
This thing we call friendship
So call me when you’re, feeling down
For you know too
I will feel alone
As kindreds always do
Call me, I’ll be around

 

The John Hamilton Grays

 

 

NaNoWriMo 2016

Tags

authoritarian, Québec City, rammstein, summer, topfree, white male, white privilege

This year’s story is inspired by an image a young female friend posted on her Facebook this summer of a young female acquaintance of hers who attended a Rammstein concert in Québec City topfree. Not completely. She wore electrical tape pasties. I don’t know how old she is, but a mutual friend (male) is 20.

A few things struck me. First, she had to convince security she was legal. Her post has since been deleted (a shame she probably incurred abuse) but I believe she confronted them rather sternly. Yeah! Second, I was there. I didn’t see her, and I didn’t attend the concert; but I was exactly where she had her confrontation outside the gates.

Rammstein fans lingering around the fountain in front of the Québec Parliament building

 

My wife and I were visiting the city that very same evening . We were on our way to Toronto and I wanted to see the Parliament (my 2011 novel has a scene at the fountain). The property was all dug up and many of the statues removed, but we walked the grounds amid the crowd of heavy metal fans. The Plains of Abraham across the road were packed, and thousands more were walking up the hill to try to squeeze in.

 

 

Somewhere out here a young Saint John woman is going topfree and having a blast

Third, I’d like to consider myself a fighter of equal rights for everybody. A woman, any woman, should be able to pull off her top and enjoy the weather just as any man can. Why they cannot speaks to the growth we have not yet attained as a  human race. It’s one thing for a young Canadian girl to do this in a large crowd in Québec City, arguably the most progressive North American city. It’s quite another to do it in America’s Jesusland where she might be severely ridiculed or jailed or in a Muslim country where she might be killed. Fourth, she was young. My research suggests most women who go topfree are a bit older. Not much but they are more mature, are wiser, maybe have worked up their courage over time. I don’t really know. I am a 55 year old white male with almost no credibility to write such a story.

My story is about a young 17 year old school student who goes top free. I am writing it in three parts: the father, the girl, and the mother. The same story from three points of view. I should be able to write the father okay, except he is totally not me and I am struggling with his words and actions. I consider myself open-minded, socially liberal (fiscally conservative), agnostic, and … meh when it comes to such things as nudity. You want to run around town buck naked? That’s how we used to do it before we left Africa. Go for it. As long as you keep your pecker to yourself. Listening and fighting with right-winged fundies has helped me, especially during this election season. I think I can see their binary, authoritarian, idiotic minds, but I really don’t understand them. When I write a man objecting to a woman breastfeeding in a coffee shop,  I feel like I’m writing satire; because I see absolutely nothing wrong with it.

Writing the girl scares me. I haven’t started yet. I have had discussions though with both young women and young men. I might be scared, but I am looking forward to writing her. My beta readers will have a field day with me. The tricky part is finding the situation where it can be accepted as natural, and not on a nude beach or behind gates and fences. Out in the open, in public, not in protest.

The mother I have yet to settle on, but so far she’s turning out to be a mess. She capitulated to her desires for freedom by marrying the young, white, privileged rich kid. Her life’s been easy but empty. She’s an alcoholic and … much more. She could be a lot of fun.

I don’t know how this will turn out. The first 5,000 words have me excited, but writing a novel is a long road. If it gets published — two more years at least before submission — you can read it and maybe understand what I am going through. If not, let’s just say I now look at women differently. I think I’ve always been pretty progressive. I treat women with full respect. I admire, appreciate, and am attracted to them as well, and there are battles. I’ve been raised with this religious-dominated view that nudity is desirable but wrong, attractive but repulsive. A bag of mixed messages. I think I have just about sorted myself out.

 

 

 

 

Novel Finished!

Tags

Canada 150, editing, nanowrimo, novel, Writing

As if novels are ever finished.

I have finished draft number 6 of novel 2011. A review: I start a novel every year during NaNoWriMo and have won that contest six years in a row. I spend the rest of the year re-writing these novels or working on other projects. Here’s a list of my novel WIPs:

Year – My Ranking of Potential (1 to 5) – Draft – Words – Status – Plan

2010 – 4 Stars – Draft 3, a complete story – 80,000 – not touched since 2012. Needs a setting overhaul and a major rewrite. – Indefinite revisit.

2011 – 5 Stars! – Draft #6 – 129,000 words – Ready for pitching – About to undertake a major submission agenda.

2012 – 4 Stars – Draft #4 – 130,000 words – Needs a story trim; much too much happening; needs a writing overhaul, a killing of bad habits. – Indefinite revisit.

2013 – 2 Stars – Draft #1 – 51,000 words – Need to find the tension. I have characters and ending but the plot falls down in the mud. – Indefinite revisit.

2014 – 4 stars – Draft #1 – 51,000 words – A Sequel to 2012; I really like this story and it could become 5 star – Indefinite revisit.

2015 – 1 Star – Draft #1 – 50,000 words – an attempt at writing in an additive style; I cannot function in this style, not solely – XXX

Undecided Upon

2016 – 5 Star! – Concept – 0 words – A story with social implications I am not sure I am qualified to pull off, but if I do …
2016 – 4 Star! – Concept – 0 words – A less defined story with social implications I feel more comfortable attacking, but the story itself is mostly undefined.

I’ve had to overcome some major writing issues since I undertook this journey, and I don’t claim to be finished. My writing has been a rebellious child.

I tend to write weak conversational sentences which overuse stage-management verbs: she looked, she saw, she felt, etc.. I also tend to generalize. I know the story, so I don’t need to write all the details. I don’t need them. And putting myself in my readers’ shoes has been a struggle. Even when I try hard, I tend to slip into the internal know-it-all mode. Yet whenever I read others’ writings, their generalizations jump out at me. It is a pattern I have yet to resolve.

I think I have figured out the tension and drama of sentences, paragraphs, sections, scenes, chapters, and stories. I have a series of blogs in progress where I elucidate my understanding of pattern in prose: the general narrative arc we so easily apply to story also applies at each sub-level. My daily reading and analysis of narrative prose has been a tremendous help as has my attacking of several writing craft books.

I think it is all coming together, finally, but of course it seems held together by fine threads.

This 2012 novel feels really good. At least it does to me. I have concerns how others will take it, and I have been mindful of the differences between my own thinking and the common person’s. I am an INFP who lives in his diffuse-thinking half of his mind and who easily visits all angles of an argument but has difficulty taking sides. He hates run-on sentences but sometimes uses them to demonstrate how he thinks. This novel has political implications, and I fear staunch wingers, left or right, may view this story as wishy-washy. Yet our world is full of wishy-washy people, and I might argue these people should run the world.

2012 is also uber-Canadian. You can’t get more Canadian than my story, and I mean that in every conceivable sense. I cant see the rest of the world reading it (especially Americans) and saying, “Wha?” Yet they will never find a better guide of our country 😉

2017 is Canada’s 150th birthday. It’s going to be a hell of a party. My guts say this story needs to be out there for much of next year, and there’s only one sure way I know of doing that, and that’s not really the route I want to take. I’d rather a major publisher take it on and pump it out in six months rather than the twenty four they a lot new authors.

If they’d only read it!

Anyway, wish me luck on this journey.

 

 

 

 

Novel Progress

Tags

2011

I am exactly halfway through my current project — I have two projects demanding attention — and I need to write something about it for posterity.

I completed Version IV of “2011” last October after some heavy summer slogging. It is a curious process, writing a novel. For each scene I read, edit, and repeat until happy, then move on to the next scene. It’s the happy part that is curious. Each pass through when I re-read a scene after much time away, I think, “My Jesus you suck, John. You write like a middle schooler.” But of course I see the errors of my ways and correct them.

This process has happened without fail. Well, there have been some temporary failures. I’ve read scenes and been happy enough to make only minor changes. I’ve never glowed with delight after reading them, well, I lie. Yes I have. But eventually I come back and return to the John-is-a-shitty-writer realization.

Sometime during last summer and fall’s edit, I recall hitting a point where I said, “You need to write like this: this is your structure, your style, and your voice.” So I changed. This January/February I read Bell’s Write Great Fiction – Plot & Structure and Wood’s How Fiction Works, two fairly advanced writing-craft books. As I worked through them, I almost continually remarked, “This is how I write; this is what I do; I know this stuff.” I have felt totally confident in my writing since I finished both. This week I hit that point in my novel I had reached last edit. I have edited about six scenes in a row where my re-reads excited me.

Of course I am editing; which means changing some things. I needed to build the threat of conspiracy, so I have been weaving that in. I have also enhanced some of the goings-on with gesture, tighter dialogue, and cutting some of the excess. There is always excess in my writing.

The 40% prior to this week, February to end of April, has been a struggle. I have used the big knives for this one. This has been the grand sacrifice of virgins and wayward travellers. I have killed so many darlings, I just about need mass graves. And I have invested much time in transience. I’ve walked, sat in coffee shops and played AlphaBetty, chatted with Tina and Bill, written poetry (see my PAD posts), and tinkered with many things not “2011” related. Yet about once a week I’ve received epiphanies. I have fed my Muses with thoughts and troubles, and I have given them long leashes. I think they have delivered. I’ve been able to pare this thing down to a level of tightness I currently feel pretty happy with.

My current word count is 125,500 down from 133,500. I’ve cut 8,000 words from the first half of this novel. Yeah. I do see some more cuts, maybe, but there are no scenes dangling in front of me like there were in the first half. I have only 1/2 a scene to cut and maybe a whole one, but I’ll decide when I get there.

This may seem like a large word count, especially if you are an agent or publisher wanting to give me a large contract, emphasis on large, but the story demands it. Seriously, it does. I won’t say much, but it is a cross-country journey. If you’ve ever travelled Canada, you know you can’t do it quickly. You know you can’t do it justice in 70k or 105k words. 145k feels right to me, but my editing skills are so good, I am now well below that. BFG 😉

So I’ve come full circle again, and this time it feels good. This time it feels very good and very right. Every day I am laughing and crying, and it’s at my work, my story, my characters. I sure hope I can get it ready sooner than later. Canada and maybe the world need to read this story 🙂

 

My Entire Novel Posted for Your Reading Pleasure:

The following is my entire [current] novel minus the words. It is the punctuation only. This post has been making rounds in Facebook writing circles. Since I code and already have a little word processing test app I’ve been playing with, adding code to strip characters was a trivial step. I have not included quotation marks — I didn’t see the point, yet. This data of course begs the question , “What does this mean?”

Action.
Friction.
Depth.
Rhetorical questions.
Voice.

I already know my writing can be languid (lots of strings of commas). I already know I tend to ask too many rhetorical questions (strings of question marks). I know I use semicolons liberally, but the result doesn’t show it. Of course it is hard to pick out trends visually.

I think this is an interesting path of analysis.Counts, repetitions, patterns.

• I use triadic sentences which should look like “;;.” A quick search in Word reveals 46 instances. Too many?
• My longest string of commas is 15.
• My longest string of semicolons is 6.
• My longest string of periods is 12.
• 821 question marks.
• I abhor exclamation marks, yet I use 142 of them!

Interesting features to investigate and edit. *sigh*

Anyway, enjoy the story.

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Novel Update

Tags

2017, Canada 150, editing, novel, Writing

I don’t say much about my writing on this blog. I’ve written much but have said little. Meet me for a coffee, and I will talk your ear off. There is too much to write about, and I’ll be honest, I don’t really know what I am doing. *grin*

2012 Novel

I have received feedback from 5 of my 8 beta readers. It ranges from apathetic to, “you probably need to have a real editor help you through the next steps. I’d send it to an agent now.” My three remaining readers are not so much proofers or editors but audience feedback. I touch areas, and these readers live in those areas. It is prodding the sleeping lion with a short stick.

2012 is currently sitting idle and will remain so for the foreseeable future.

2010 Novel

This story keeps creeping into my head. It is probably because the inspiration for it came from an apartment in the building directly across from our apartment (been here just over a year.) The story has issues, and I don’t know if I am ready to tackle them. I do like it, though, and will have to put serious thought into a plan.

2013 Novel

No plans to take this on. It might have potential, but there is nothing particularly compelling about it.

2014 Novel

This is a sequel to 2012. As with 2012, it addresses important issues that have never before been covered in a novel, and it needs to get out there. *Damn you 2017!

2015 Novel

I am currently trying some ideas out for the next NaNoWrimo. My mind hoards images and inspiration. A few of them are colliding: magical realism, additive sentence style, satire, immigration and emigration (I descend from immigrants and I are an expat), the American Revolution, Vermont dress-code and hairstyles, and the history of my current city a.k.a. The Loyalist City. There is still something missing, and I don’t know what it is. Yes I do, a story.

The Manatee

I am writing a few satirical articles for the Award Winning online blog. My stories.

2011 Novel

I have decided to re-write 2011 and this is where my current fiction-writing efforts are focused. The reason is simple and pressing: this story needs to be published in 2017.

I have overcome some serious flaws in my writing. I still write conversationally, but I am much better at using active verbs. I used to write passive sentences habitually, and I somehow developed the habit of overusing stage management verbs. Copulas have also been a problem, but no as bad as the other issues. A focus on editing has done wonders over these past five years, my reading pace and the quality of my analysis has picked up, and I am seeing the bigger pictures: conflict, character, imagery, theme, etc. My writing feels tighter when I read it back to myself.

I sat down with Mr. 2011 sometime this winter or spring. Its prose was dreadful. Not all of it, but much of it was filled with stage management, filtering verbs – she thinks, sees, feels, and wants. *gag* The scenes had little purpose except for getting from A to B (as one has to do in travel stories), and it was loose. It was more than loose, it was wobbly. It was bloody awful. But as I said, the story needs to be published in 2017.

2017 is Canada’s 150th birthday. It promises to be a huge year in Canada. If you have a Canadian novel — a novel written by a Canadian, set in Canada, and about Canada, this year could be a gold mine. You’d be a fool to pass it by. My 2011 story is about a cross-Canada tour. It is political, tactile, thematic, and in the end, celebratory. I say this honestly and not because I want to sell a million copies: my 2011 story is the perfect Canadian read for 2017. I began writing it long before I realize the significance of 2017, so I will claim it is an honest novel and not manufactured to take advantage of the birthday. I am also encouraged that the people I tell the story outline to all agree — this story needs to be published in 2017!

This morning I finished re-writing up to page 182 of 333, double-spaced Word 2007. 127k words at the moment. I have much left to do. The next step is to edit the belly-of-the-whale scene, the center of the story marking the return home, virtually speaking. The scene takes place on parliament hill during Canada Day celebrations, and I have spent much time at it. This edit will be more a line edit but also to add in elements to make it align with the story and themes, if it doesn’t already, if it would help. The scene has to stay pretty much as it is though. It is a darling that will never be killed by my hands. Without giving too much away, let’s just say the Don Cherry Seven Second Delay makes an appearance.

I have struggled getting this far. I still may re-write PEI and NS. NF and NB are sitting well with me. Québec was a struggle — isn’t it always? — but some research and some deep thought have helped me straighten it. My editor — if you are an editor, I need you! — will have fun with Québec. I left Québec very happy, and I think Québec is very happy I left it.

I entered Ontario a couple of weeks ago distraught. It was some of the worst prose I have ever put on a page. I cut quite a bit of it, yet the basic story needed to remain — again the A to B thing and a need for a setup of the belly-of-the-whale scene. I pondered my root story and my themes, tried a few things, discussed a few ideas with fellow writers, reminisced about certain activities in my past from my time living in Ottawa, and I have crafted some scenes that I now really like. I laugh just thinking about them. And I have to say, this will be a fun, summer read. It is not light and fluffy. It is not an airhead read. It is simple prose, and technically, it is an easy read, but I ask important questions most of us may need to think about.

There are groups of people that will disdain this story — the clowns and the jokers. I acknowledge that, and I am sorry, but there is nothing I can do for you but smile and wave.

Where to from here?

There are big questions surrounding this story:

• is my writing really tight enough?
• is the story tight enough?
• does the story really need to be published in 2017?
• do I invest time in beta readers?
• do I query an agent, a mid-level publisher, or go it alone?

I only have two “knows” at the moment. 1. This draft will be completed by the end of August, and 2. Martin(1) will edit it(2) during that first week of September. He doesn’t know his schedule yet 😉

2017 arrives in 17 months! I have to get this to an agent, sign a deal, and get a publishing deal all during September. Self-publishing might be the only way this thing gets out on time, and I hate that thought. I disdain self-publishing for its deigning of quality.

(1)Martin Wightman is a journalist and copy editor at NB News who has recently started writing a regular science column for the Telegraph Journal (protected by pay-wall,) a freelancer, and a song writer (I think). He is also a friend who has edited a few of my pieces, tough but encouraging .
(2)I love working with editors 😉

If you are an agent or publisher looking for that perfect, Canadian novel for 2017. Please contact me. Save us both some time and effort. 😉